Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski, a kind of poet laureate of the seedy side of Los Angeles, wrote of life on its margins, at its racetracks, in its rundown bars. Bukowski was a poet and a novelist; in his novels, his alter ego Henry Chinaski made all kinds of bad decisions. But even while desperate, there was something appealing about Chinaski's desire to make something out of his beaten-down life. As in this passage: "After dinner or lunch or whatever it was -- with my crazy 12-hour night I was no longer sure what was what -- I said, 'Look, baby, I'm sorry, but don't you realize that this job is driving me crazy?

Charles Bukowski was known for his drinking as much as his poetry. So maybe, the man Time magazine once described as "the laureate of lowlife," would have approved of a 20th-anniversary memorial held in his honor at the dimly lighted King Eddy Saloon on the edge of skid row. The dive bar, said to be a favorite haunt of the poet and his own idol, novelist John Fante, was filled with Bukowski fans Sunday, spilling out onto the street in a...

now the territory is taken, the sacrificial lambs have been slain, as history is scratched again on the sallow walls, as the bankers scurry to survive, as the young girls paint their hungry lips, as the dogs sleep in temporary peace, as the shadow gets ready to fall, as the oceans gobble the poisons of man, as heaven and hell dance in the anteroom, it's begin again and go again, it's bake the apple, buy the car, mow the lawn, pay the tax, hang the toilet paper, clip the nails, listen to the

When Charles Bukowski died in San Pedro 20 years ago, the obituaries in the next day's papers typically began with some iteration of Time magazine's stock description of the writer as the "laureate of American lowlife. " In the decades since, the drinking, brawling, gambling, whoring cliche has become so entrenched and widely propagated it can be hard to see Bukowski's words for his shadow. The "Barfly" legend, sprouted from the self-mythology Bukowski cultivated in countless quasi-autobiographical works including his celebrated movie screenplay and fed by his real-life drunken bouts of abusiveness, has only grown posthumously.

A large gravelly head, deep-set eyes often hidden in shadow. This is either the head of some creature that staggered from its cave to tear Sinbad and his sailors limb from limb, or a profound and formidable visage that would look fine on Mount Rushmore alongside the other notables. A face like that must give a man a sense of destiny. Los Angeles poet and fiction writer Charles Bukowski, who died of leukemia on March 9 at the age of 73, managed to create a life worthy of his face.

The FBI had its own notes on "dirty old man" Charles Bukowski. The writer was investigated by the agency as a civil servant with ties to the underground press -- and for being a self-described "dirty old man. " Recently National Book Award-winning author William T. Vollmann went public with his FBI surveillance, writing about his experiences of both being watched and reading the report. (At one point, as Vollmann writes in this month's Harpers , he was suspected of being the Unabomber.)

A poem by Charles Bukowski is featured in an advertisement for Dewar's, the 157-year-old blended scotch. If only the notoriously hard-drinking poet had lived long enough to reap the rewards of his endorsement. The L.A. poet died in 1994 at age 73, having lived long enough to go from being an antihero of the underground to being celebrated internationally for his writing. His life was fictionalized in the film " Barfly ," and his papers are now in the collection at the highbrow Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.

Barbet Schroeder's "Charles Bukowski" (screening at EZTV, 8547 Santa Monica Blvd., at 8 p.m. Friday through Sunday and the same times the following weekend) is a thoroughly entertaining two-hour conversation with the poet laureate of L.A. lowlife, made in 1985 for French television. This month, Schroeder, the distinguished French writer-producer-director-documentarian, is at long last to start shooting Bukowski's "Barfly," starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway.

The low-life serenade writing style of the rebellious Charles Bukowski is an acquired taste, but the good news about "Factotum" is that you don't need to acquire it in order to thoroughly enjoy this playfully bleak piece of work. That's because "Factotum," based on a 1975 Bukowski novel, is actually a delicate melding of a trio of sensibilities that don't naturally cohere.

Charles Bukowski, the prolific writer and poet laureate of Los Angeles low-life whose rough-hewn autobiographical poems, short stories, novels and 1987 film "Barfly" chronicled his hard-bitten alcoholic youth, died Wednesday. He was 73. Bukowski, a cult favorite in Europe even before he achieved fame at home, died of leukemia at San Pedro Peninsula Hospital, said his wife, Linda. She said that although he had suffered from the disease for about a year he had worked until recently.

The steakhouse may be America's greatest single achievement. Sure, there's that Constitution everyone's so impressed with, and baseball and Elizabeth Banks. But if you had to narrow it down to one thing, one crowning glorious creation that captures the nation's spirit and pastoral roots, it's probably a red-boothed steakhouse, where the waitresses are as old as the best wines, and platters of beef are presented presidentially. In a good steakhouse, every man feels part king, part cowboy.

The Coen brothers' new film, "Inside Llewyn Davis," covers one drain-circling week in the life of a marginally successful folk singer in 1961 New York City, inspired in part by the memoir of folk personality Dave Van Ronk. But to be clear, Llewyn Davis is not Bob Dylan. He's not Van Ronk. He's not even Oscar Isaac. "The description at the audition was, 'He is not Dylan. He is not the poet. He is a workman, a blue-collar guy from the boroughs.' So I latched on to that idea, the workman, and what that meant," says Isaac.

A poem by Charles Bukowski is featured in an advertisement for Dewar's, the 157-year-old blended scotch. If only the notoriously hard-drinking poet had lived long enough to reap the rewards of his endorsement. The L.A. poet died in 1994 at age 73, having lived long enough to go from being an antihero of the underground to being celebrated internationally for his writing. His life was fictionalized in the film " Barfly ," and his papers are now in the collection at the highbrow Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.

The FBI had its own notes on "dirty old man" Charles Bukowski. The writer was investigated by the agency as a civil servant with ties to the underground press -- and for being a self-described "dirty old man. " Recently National Book Award-winning author William T. Vollmann went public with his FBI surveillance, writing about his experiences of both being watched and reading the report. (At one point, as Vollmann writes in this month's Harpers , he was suspected of being the Unabomber.)

Endurance is a staple of performance art. In 1971, Chris Burden locked himself inside a small school locker at UC Irvine for five days. Three years later, Linda Mary Montano performed "Three Day Blindfold," groping her way around San Francisco with her eyes shrouded by a blindfold. That same year, for eight hours a day over three days, German artist Joseph Beuys was locked inside a New York gallery with a wild coyote. Marina Abramovic and Ulay Laysiepen spent 90 days in 1988 walking the length of the Great Wall of China from opposite ends until, finally meeting in the middle, they said their goodbyes and ended their 12-year collaboration.

Ben Pleasants L.A. poet and playwright Ben Pleasants, 72, a Los Angeles poet and playwright who also championed the work of Charles Bukowski and John Fante in literary critiques, died of a heart attack April 18 in Crescent City, his wife, Paula, said. Born Aug. 6, 1940, in Weehawken, N.J., Pleasants graduated from Hofstra University on New York's Long Island in 1962 and within a few years enrolled in graduate English courses at UCLA. Beginning in the mid-1960s he wrote for the Los Angeles Free Press and regularly contributed book and theater reviews to The Times from the late 1960s until the mid-1980s.

Oscar Wilde went to prison in 1895 for flaunting his homosexuality. Ezra Pound was indicted for treason in 1943 for broadcasting on behalf of the Italian fascists in the Second World War. Dylan Thomas died in 1953 after proclaiming that he had just downed 18 straight whiskeys and wondering if it were a record. I mention them to emphasize that not all poets are whispering pixies. Some are maniacs, some are drunks and some are general hell-raisers.

By rights, "Visceral Bukowski" by Ben Pleasants should be a pretty joyless affair. The world hardly needs another tome about Charles Bukowski -- this volume's tiny Michigan-based publisher has no less than five books built around the poet laureate of booze, broads and woozy hangovers. This one is uneven and at times seems unedited.

Charles Bukowski, a kind of poet laureate of the seedy side of Los Angeles, wrote of life on its margins, at its racetracks, in its rundown bars. Bukowski was a poet and a novelist; in his novels, his alter ego Henry Chinaski made all kinds of bad decisions. But even while desperate, there was something appealing about Chinaski's desire to make something out of his beaten-down life. As in this passage: "After dinner or lunch or whatever it was -- with my crazy 12-hour night I was no longer sure what was what -- I said, 'Look, baby, I'm sorry, but don't you realize that this job is driving me crazy?

When Marjory Gilbert read a Times On Location story about the movie "Bukowski," produced and directed by James Franco, it brought back vivid memories of her long-ago encounter with the late poet. Gilbert was working as a clerk in the history department at Cal State Los Angeles in the late 1970s when she joined a grad student friend to hear Charles Bukowski give a reading of his poetry at a campus bookstore. "It was quite an evening," said Gilbert, who is 90 and lives in Claremont.